Saturday, May 1, 2010

Size Matters

Dean Baker uses his blog to chastise US media for its sloppy reporting. Here's a bit where Baker points out that poor reporting by a newspaper:
Those are the questions that readers of the WAPO's Sunday Outlook section must be asking. The Post told readers that: "this year, China's economy is expected to produce about $5 trillion in goods and services. That would put it ahead of Japan as the world's second-biggest national economy, but it would still be barely one-third the size of the $14 trillion U.S. economy."

This reflects China's GDP measured on an exchange rate basis. However, economists typically use purchasing power parity measures of GDP for international comparisons. By this measure, China's economy is expected to be about $9.5 trillion this year. At its current growth rate, it will pass the size of the U.S. economy in about five years.

By many measures it is already larger than the U.S.. For example, it has more Internet users, college graduates in science and engineering, a larger car market, and about twice as many cell phone users.
Size does matter. China is now a size where other nations will kowtow to it. The US is slowly being shuffled to the side. Sure it will take two decades, but the writing is on the wall. The American Century is over. This will be the Asian Century with China and India taking a seat at the high table.

What I find funny is that the right wing Americans, the ones who beat their chest about patriotism and keeping America #1, are precisely the people who have caused the eclipse. It was these "patriots" who go the US to shed blood in useless wars and throw away the people's money trying to run garrisons and wars around the world. Sure, this change of guard was inevitable, but it would have probably happened 60 or 80 years from now except for the right wing fanatics who ensured it will happen in 10 or 20 years.

The lesson to learn: Things are not as they seem. Those who cry the loudest that they are patriots often are the ones who are busy destroying the foundations of a nation.

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